US Particle Accelerators Turn Nuclear Waste Into Electricity, Cut Radioactive Life By 99.7% (interestingengineering.com) 67
Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. "The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce additional electricity for the grid," reports Interesting Engineering. The projects are supported by $8.17 million in grants from the Department of Energy's NEWTON (Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now) program. From the report: The researchers are developing ADS technology. This system uses a particle accelerator to fire high-energy protons at a target (such as liquid mercury), triggering a process called "spallation." This releases a flood of neutrons that interact with unwanted, long-lived isotopes in nuclear waste. The technology can effectively "burn" the most hazardous components of the waste by transmuting these elements. While unprocessed fuel remains dangerous for approximately 100,000 years, partitioning and recycling via ADS can reduce that window to just 300 years. [...]
To make ADS economically viability, Jefferson Lab is tackling two primary technical hurdles: efficiency and power. Traditional particle accelerators require massive, expensive cryogenic cooling systems to reach superconducting temperatures. Jefferson Lab is pioneering a more cost-effective approach by coating the interior of pure niobium cavities with tin. These niobium-tin cavities can operate at higher temperatures, allowing for the use of standard commercial cooling units rather than custom, large-scale cryogenic plants. The team is also developing spoke cavities, which is a complex design intended to drive even higher efficiency in neutron spallation.
The second project focuses on the power source behind the beam. Researchers are adapting the magnetron -- the same component that powers microwave ovens -- to provide the 10 megawatts of power required for ADS. The primary challenge is that the energy frequency must match the accelerator cavity precisely at 805 Megahertz. In collaboration with Stellant Systems, researchers are prototyping advanced magnetrons that can be combined to reach the necessary high-power thresholds with maximum efficiency. The NEWTON program aims to enable the recycling of the entire US commercial nuclear fuel stockpile within the next 30 years.
To make ADS economically viability, Jefferson Lab is tackling two primary technical hurdles: efficiency and power. Traditional particle accelerators require massive, expensive cryogenic cooling systems to reach superconducting temperatures. Jefferson Lab is pioneering a more cost-effective approach by coating the interior of pure niobium cavities with tin. These niobium-tin cavities can operate at higher temperatures, allowing for the use of standard commercial cooling units rather than custom, large-scale cryogenic plants. The team is also developing spoke cavities, which is a complex design intended to drive even higher efficiency in neutron spallation.
The second project focuses on the power source behind the beam. Researchers are adapting the magnetron -- the same component that powers microwave ovens -- to provide the 10 megawatts of power required for ADS. The primary challenge is that the energy frequency must match the accelerator cavity precisely at 805 Megahertz. In collaboration with Stellant Systems, researchers are prototyping advanced magnetrons that can be combined to reach the necessary high-power thresholds with maximum efficiency. The NEWTON program aims to enable the recycling of the entire US commercial nuclear fuel stockpile within the next 30 years.
Interesting, but impractical (Score:5, Interesting)
Can it generate enough to power at least the part of the beam that feeds it? And can it reprocess anything but a tiny amount?
The answer is very likely "no" to both questions and likely to remain so.
Re:Interesting, but impractical (Score:5, Informative)
As long as the energy demands are not excessive, this alone makes it worth it...
While unprocessed fuel remains dangerous for approximately 100,000 years, partitioning and recycling via ADS can reduce that window to just 300 years.
History indicates no human construct can reliably safeguard nuke waste for 100K years. But 300 years? That's do-able!
Storing waste is easy (Score:5, Interesting)
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NIMBY!
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Sure. If you know to solve a problem nicely, you know how to solve that problem nicely. There is just one tiny problem with that type of "argument".
Re: Storing waste is easy (Score:2)
children.
this is not their problem.
300 needs to be 3.
this appears to be a great start.
so when the scientists are done celebrating.
get back to work.
it is not a good idea to leave a project half life done
Re:Storing waste is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
I am fine with storing 2 days worth of nuclear waste of a typical reactor in 1.7 billion year old bedrock.
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That's just the uranium. There is a lot more high level nuclear waste than 10 lbs. 600,000 US gallons of liquid waste, for a start.
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Re:Storing waste is easy (Score:4)
Not the case. The deposition of the Oklo deposit in a shallow marine setting has been followed by moderate grade metamorphic recrystallisation of the rocks, several stages of folding and fighting, as well as recent (last few million years) uplift and erosion in it's current setting.
It's not the most active of areas, but it's also not the quietest of areas. It's pretty unremarkable in that respect.
A colleague ,working with me off the coast of Gabon, took a couple of weeks leave after his hitch at work to go walkabout in Central Gabon, including trying to get access to the uranium mines in the area. If I see him again, I'll ask if he actually got to see anything interesting. Got to give him brownie points for trying.
(You're likely going to tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about. My mapping area contained rocks of approximately the same age, but metamorphosed to a considerably higher degree, then overthrust by relatively recent rocks of the Cambrian- Silurian Caledonian orogeny. My rock pile on the other hand, from about 50 miles (crow) to 100 miles (road) north contains stromatolites which are approximately a billion years old - half the age of the Oklo rocks ; and twice the age of the Caledonian faulting. The number of professional geologists in this thread is not less than one.)
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That is interesting information about the geology. I will say though, that while it does show that the rock is not "quiet" from a geological perspective, it also throws a bit of doubt on FeelGood314's premise that the "waste"t from the reaction hasn't moved in all that time. It was dubious to start with given that the whole reason the reaction happened in the first place was uranium dissolving in groundwater in the presence of oxygen. While there are traces left, the fact that it's not "quiet" and that mate
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The boundary of the area where the uranium concentration is high enough to be worth mining is fairly sharp. Where there is stratigraphical continuity (i.e. not a faulted contact) with the surrounding rocks, the uranium remains confined in a fairly small area. Which is fairly good from a waste containment point of view.
Uranium's behaviour as a sedimentary material in a variable redox environment is complicated.. But since we're talking about proterozoic sediments we know that the effective oxygen contend was
Re: Storing waste is easy (Score:3)
1. Thatâ(TM)s great and all, but can we identify which rocks wonâ(TM)t move for the next 100,000 years? We can certainly make educated guesses, but our understanding of how the planetâ(TM)s surface moves is still pretty immature.
2. Great, you protected it against geology, what about protecting the people who are mining in 5000 years, and have no idea what they just hit? Thereâ(TM)s no guarantee at all that theyâ(TM)ll understand any of the warnings we try to put in place, or know
Re: Storing waste is easy (Score:3)
Ah, don't underestimate those pesky humans who live among us. Most tombs in the Valley of the Kings were looted within 100 years of their sealing.
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The waste from the Oklo natural nuclear reactor has moved only centimeters in the last 2 billion years. So we know if you just bury the waste in the right type of rock you will be fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... [wikipedia.org]
Sure, and formations like balancing rocks have been standing for geological periods as well. That doesn't mean that you can stack rocks on each other so they are balanced and leave and expect to come back ten thousand years later and they will still be like that. Also, when you look at buildings that have been standing for a thousand years, you could conclude that "they don't build them like they used to" and that any structure built by people back then must also be able to survive a thousand years. That's
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It will never be economically viable though. From a business perspective 100,000 years and 300 years are the same thing, a huge cost that has no return on investment. They will have to be forced to do it.
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Yep. But that force would need to come from the population, and the average voter does not even understand why their cost of living has gone up dramatically this year, despite that being blatantly obvious. Expect nothing to come from this discovery, at least regarding nuclear waste.
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If it's net energy positive then that alone is reason enough to do it.
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300 years? Have you taken _any_ look at human history at all?
Re: Interesting, but impractical (Score:2)
Hey, we are an aspirational race!
Re:Interesting, but impractical (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up in a house that was more than 300 years old. There are plenty of churches in Europe that have crypts which were sealed 1,000 years ago and are still in fine shape. There are large scale human constructions such as the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids and the Great Wall of China that are over 2,000 years old. Construction to last 300 years is not that hard.
Probably more importantly, 300 years is short enough that people might actually remember why they are not supposed to go "in there". I suspect that one of the biggest challenges with burying waste for 10,000 years would people thinking that it looks "interesting" after 1,000 years and digging it back up.
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After 300 years said waste is comparable in radioactivity to natural uranium ore.
Try about 5000 years. [world-nuclear.org]
Please explain the glaring double standard (Score:2)
Yet global warming threatens the whole GLOBE, with consequences due in mere centuries, is so contentious for some to even believe let alone be acted upon?
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The whole 100K years thing is anti-nuclear FUD meant to cause people to throw up their hands and say IMPOSSIBLE!.
With very basic re-processing, we can already get the storage time of the hotter elements down to 250 years or so. The rest is commercially valuable nuclear fuel.
We don't actually have to bring the waste down to zero activity. The natural uranium ore was radioactive when we dug it out of the ground in the first place. We just have to make sure what we put back is no more radioactive than that.
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The Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland looks good for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository [wikipedia.org]
We could have done something similar with Yucca mountain if politics didn't nuke the project, so to speak.
Moltex Energy [moltexenergy.com] has some economically viable nuclear reactor designs, one of which is designed to burn waste fuel from other reactors after a much simpler reprocessing chain than is required now. They're building a pilot plant in New Brunswick (https://www.moltexenergy.com [moltexenergy.com]
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Re:Green Goalposts. (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer is most likely Yes.
The answer is most likely that you are a clueless cretin with strong opinions built entirely on lies.
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Does it solve for a highly radioactive and dangerous problem plaguing a planet
No. Every fuel campaign of any one reactor releases hundreds of tons of materials of various levels of radioactivity, over 1k isotopes in all, each and every one of them with their own peculiarities of decay. This translates to millions of moles * 6.10^23 nuclei that the technology has to deal with. The cross-sections for most of these are vanishingly small and you need several decay steps per every product of every nuclei to make it non-radioactive.
So, let's say you want to dispose of the load from one re
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to tens of hundreds of thousands of particles per second
FTFM.
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Very nicely put. This is really more a research experiment, rather than something that would be commercially viable. IIRC, the "waste" once the viable 235 U have been used up is a nice mix of stuff, though mainly 238U. The proton induced fission cross section for U is of the order of a barn at 20 MeV, and so you can make a bit of 239Np and the other stuff will be a mixed bag. (It's been a while since I did this, and only glanced at a few things online.) But I'm sure they're having fun there at the lab,
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Nuclear proliferation is no joke, but it seems that particular genii escaped the bottle decades ago.
Re: Interesting, but impractical (Score:2)
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Yeah, but sometimes you can take a look at something like this and it looks like projects to try and store power by building towers and raising weights up them. Sure, it can't store any practical amount of power, but they're working the basics out. But some easy back of the envelope math shows that it is utterly impossible for it to be viable technically or economically. Now, admittedly, you can't say the same 100% on this sort of project, but the fact is that what is described in the headline would be a ne
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Indeed. This would need to be financially positive to matter. It will not be. Hence it is a meaningless stunt, probably designed to convince the stupid that nuclear waste is not a problem. And it will work in that capacity.
Re: Interesting, but impractical (Score:2)
I think it sounds like positive and interesting research. That does not mean that we should make any assumptions that it will actually turn into a viable solution to the nuclear waste problem, but I think cynicism is equally unwarranted. At the very least, lessons are being learned that could help us find better ways of dealing with nuclear waste in the future.
It is unfortunate that basic research frequently gets misappropriated as propaganda, but the research is still important.
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gweihir gets a dopamine hit every time he posts on this technology news site to the effect that some new technology isn't practical, won't work, he knows better, etc.
Let him have it; I think he needs this.
Re: Interesting, but impractical (Score:3)
Does it even matter? The storage cost, site prep and danger of leaks for 300k year storage are far more than any energy recoup from processing.
Re:Interesting, but impractical (Score:4, Informative)
Can it generate enough to power
The concept originally proposed by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbio is supposed to produce energy. The reactor operates at criticality factor just below 1 (one main idea is safety, by avoiding any risk of meltdown). It only needs a small boost from the proton beam, which at the same time is used to transmute waste actinides. The demonstrator in construction at the SCK-CEN center in Europe uses a linear accelerator of 100 MeV at 4 mA https://www.myrrha.be/about-my... [myrrha.be] , so nominally a beam power of 400 kW. Of course the overall system will need 10 times more energy, or even more. But even using several megawatts of for the pumping and cooling of the accelerator, the energy balance will be very positive.
What the US team claims is their new development reduces the energy needs for the cryogenics, improving an already positive economical balance.
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You're mistaken. The concept mentioned in the summary (and the one under construction in Belgium) are a sub-critical reactor where the criticality is reached through a particle accelerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It's a different concept than the breeder rector which does not use an accelerator, and has liquid sodium as coolant, one commercial version being under construction in China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The way you've worded that, you didn't reach breakeven. Assuming there is some kind of equivalency between energy and pleasure.
Hope this is true. (Score:2)
IDK, this sounds pretty good. Tell me more...
Tin (Score:1)
Fusion (Score:4, Funny)
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Nobody has discussed cold fusion seriously in many decades. Hot fusion is catastrophically under-funded (the total spent on fusion research globally in the lat 60 years is about the same as spent just on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry every three days, to give you a perspective on how expensive energy work actually is even for fuels that are simple and well understood).
If you spent as much on fusion yearly as you spend on fossil fuels yearly, then fusion will be cracked before 2030. If you underfund
Source please (Score:3)
'Hot fusion is catastrophically under-funded (the total spent on fusion research globally in the lat 60 years is about the same as spent just on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry every three days'
Define 'subsidies'. The proper definition of 'subsidies' is direct payments from the taxpayer to the producer. I'm extremely doubtful those even exist. Or are you thinking of the capital allowances, depreciation etc., that any resource company will receive because those are the costs of doing business?
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The IMF uses the proper definition.
I think we can trust those who actually have access to the data to have represented it accurately. If you have a problem with the results, then that's not a fault with the definition.
This page? (Score:2)
https://www.imf.org/en/topics/... [imf.org]
I understand their claim, but it is categorising allowing pollution as a subsidy, which is unusual, though does make sense, except for congestion.
As someone who is in favour of substantial increases in carbon pricing the link provides some good data. Thank you for pointing me to the IMF.
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It has some logic to it (Score:2)
But it's not one that is really rigorous. The more common terminology for the unusual items which the IMF is including as 'subsidies' is 'market failures'. These are a very real problem, but to call them 'subsidies' is strange.
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The IMF was subverted from its intended mission of monetary stabilization pretty damn quick.
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By the "logic" of implicit subsidies, someone else should be paying for my trash pickup. Probably Amazon, given how much stuff my wife orders, and the supermarket.
Among the stupid things is when they call VAT an explicit subsidy. And possib
Re: Fusion (Score:2)
Pretty sure weâ(TM)ll get at least a working prototype fusion reactor by 2030. SPARC is well under construction, and thereâ(TM)s a few other promising alternatives out there.
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None of the approaches to cold fusion appear to have any chance of success. There is quite a bit of effort going on in hot fusion, but its not clear how long it will be to the first power plant - it might be quite a while.
0.03% left (Score:2)
0.03% of 4.5 billion years (U238) is still 1.35 million years.
Old concept, well researched (Score:2)
This has been around for quite some time.
This article on related research in Belgium is from 2012.
https://wavewatching.net/2012/... [wavewatching.net]
And they are now building a commercial scale facility.
https://www.sckcen.be/en/infra... [sckcen.be]
Half life math (Score:2)
A piece of nuclear waste contains a certain amount of energy. If it's released steadily* over 1e5 years, the radiation can't be very intense. Conversely, materials with short half-lives are "hotter". So I'd be more afraid of having the latter in my back yard, but for some reason the public scare is always about the long time scales, rather than intensity.
*(Exponential decay is not strictly "steady" as in linear, but for these purposes the details don't really matter.)
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The public scare about long half-lives is particularly weird when considering other aspects of nuclear vs. fossil power. Nuclear is known for rare freak events such as Chernobyl, which kill a bunch of people at once, while it's fossil fuels that are killing a lot more people in the long term. This is so even if we don't consider global warming, due to effects such as fine particle pollution. Here nuclear is the scary one, because there are no sudden deaths due to fine particle pollution, and because people
What a crap anagram. (Score:3)
Sorry, not feeling well. (Score:2)